Featured Story

week of December 28, 2019

Messy Spirituality

by Mike Yaconelli

My life is a mess.

After forty-five years of trying to follow Jesus, I keep losing Him in the crowded busyness of my life. I know Jesus is there, somewhere, but it’s difficult to make Him out in the haze of everyday life.

For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a godly person. Yet when I look at the yesterdays of my life, what I see, mostly, is a broken, irregular path littered with mistakes and failure. I have had temporary successes and isolated moments of closeness to God, but I long for the continuing presence of Jesus. Most of the moments of my life seem hopelessly tangled in a web of obligations and distractions.

I want to be a good person. I don’t want to fail. I want to learn from my mistakes, rid myself of distractions, and run into the arms of Jesus. Most of the time, however, I feel as if I am running away from Jesus into the arms of my own clutteredness.

I want desperately to know God better. I want to be consistent. Right now the only consistency in my life is my inconsistency. Who I want to be and who I am are not very close together. I am not doing well at the living-a-consistent- life thing.

I don’t want to be St. John of the Cross or Billy Graham. I just want to be remembered as a person who loved God, who served others more than he served himself, who was trying to grow in maturity and stability. I want to have more victories than defeats, yet here I am, almost sixty, and I fail on a regular basis.

If I were to die today, I would be nervous about what people would say at my funeral. I would be happy if they said things like “He was a nice guy” or “He was occasionally decent” or “Mike wasn’t as bad as a lot of people.” Unfortunately, eulogies are delivered by people who know the deceased. I know what the consensus would be: “Mike was a mess.”

I have been trying to follow Christ for most of my life, and the best I can do is a stumbling, bumbling, clumsy kind of following. Even though I am a minister, even though I think about Jesus every day, my following is . . . uh . . . meandering.

So I’ve decided to write a book about the spiritual life.

I know what you’re thinking. Based on what I’ve just said about my walk with God, having me write about spirituality is like having Bozo the Clown explain the meaning of the universe, like playing Handel’s Messiah on the kazoo. How can someone whose life is so obviously unspiritual presume to talk about spirituality? How can someone unholy presume to talk about holiness? It makes no sense.

Unless. Unless! Unless spirituality, as most of us understand it, is not spirituality at all.

Spirituality for the rest of us

Sadly, spiritual is most commonly used by Christians to describe people who pray all day long, read their Bibles constantly, never get angry or rattled, possess special powers, and have the inside track to God. Spirituality, for most, has an otherworldly ring to it, calling to mind eccentric “saints” who have forsaken the world, taken vows of poverty, and isolated themselves in cloisters.

Nothing wrong with the spirituality of monks. Monks certainly experience a kind of spirituality, a way of seeking and knowing God, but what about the rest of us? What about those of us who live in the city, have a wife or husband, three children, two cats, and a washing machine that has stopped working? What about those of us who are single, work sixty to seventy hours a week, have parents who wonder why we’re not married, and have friends who make much more money than we do? What about those of us who are divorced, still trying to heal from the scars of rejection, trying to cope with the single-parenting of children who don’t understand why this has happened to them?

Is there a spirituality for the rest of us who are not secluded in a monastery, who don’t have it all together and probably never will?

The answer is yes!

What landed Jesus on the cross was the preposterous idea that common, ordinary, broken, screwed-up people could be godly. What drove Jesus’ enemies crazy were His criticisms
of the “perfect” religious people and His acceptance of the imperfect nonreligious people. The shocking implication of Jesus’ ministry is that anyone can be spiritual.

—Condensed from Messy Spirituality by Mike Yaconelli

Click here to download the full PDF version of this week’s bulletin